Essay 2

Writing essay number 2 was a lot harder for me than the first essay, mainly because I had never done a close reading of anything before in so much depth, especially a poem. Poems  take a lot more time and willpower to analyze than novels or essays because the meaning is often hidden and the poem is written in such a way that makes it hard to understand. However, when I picked “Queens, 1963” by Julia Alvarez, I found it to be pretty interesting and easy to understand the message of the poem. Once I understood what the poem was about, I had to find specific lines to support my argument, which wasn’t too bad. However, my biggest problem was trying to find evidence of anything through the use of poetic devices. I don’t have the slightest clue how different meters and line breaks, or pretty much any poetic device, give different meanings to the message. I couldn’t figure out any peculiar thing about how the poem was written to be able to use it as textual evidence. As far as I could tell, the poem was written like most other poems.

From peer review, I hope to see ways that I can improve several aspects of my paper, mainly the thesis, persuasion, and use of evidence. I would like to include some analysis of poetic devices if I could figure out which ones mean what. Even though close readings aren’t as interesting as a free choice paper, I expected it to be a lot more tedious and strenuous. But luckily, the meaning of “Queens, 1963” came pretty quickly to me, so hopefully I’ll be able to formulate a good close reading essay from it.